PI ARE VERY HIP

I suspect the problem begins with the oft quoted but not well understood phrase, “pie are squared.” In the first place, it’s not. In fact, you cannot square a circle, and yet it is done everyday, out of sight for those of use who are math-impared. This is so becasue  pi is the relationship between the length of the line forming a circle, divided by the distance across that same circle. And this somehow always works out to be 3.141592653589793238…etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitas, infeliciter, and never repeating. This makes Pi an irrational number, which is confusing again because I find all numbers irrational.

To find the area of a living room you simply ask a realitor, and then subtract 10%. But to find the area of a circle you nust  multiply pi times the radius of the circle squared, or to put it another way, the radius of the circle times the radius of the circle. In the shorthand of math-speak that beomes, A(rea)= piR squared. This is true math-media.

What this mystery formula really means is that you can never turn a circle into a square of the exact same size: close, but never exact. And it doesn’t matter if it is a great big circle or an itty-bitty one. Pi is always 3.141 etcetera, etcetera.

If you are a math freak this is obvious, while the rest of us have to be satisfied with accepting that Pi is an irrational number and live with it. But I ask you, what is the value of knowing pi?

I had a fourth grade teacher who was so obsessed with having her students memorize the value of Pi to twenty decimal places that she had us memorize the following poem: “Sir, I send a rhyme excelling, In sacred truth and rigid spelling, Numerical sprites elucidate, For me the lexicon’s full weight”. Each of the 20 words of that poem has the number of letters required to read out the first twenty digits of pi. I had to memorized that poem again in my thirties because as a ten year old I couldn’t spell the word Nantucket, and as a sixty year old I rely upon a spell checker to detail any word that rhymes with  “elucidate”. So this poem was as much a mystery to me then as the number Pi remains today.

But I am older now and I have made a fool of myself in front of an innumerable people, and have grown so used to making mistakes in public that I hardly notice the embarrassment anymore. So I openly admit that I still find pi a puzzle. Besides, every time I make a mistake, I learn something new. Things my mistakes have taught me so far include, never turn down a chance to use the bathroom, never loan money to attractive women, never invest in a Nigerian lottery ticket, never give out my social security number over the net, and never question the value of pi.

Legend has it that the great Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse was struggling over the solution to pi when a Roman soldier blundered into his garden. The old man supposedly snapped, “Don’t touch my circles!”, whereupon the chastised legionary pulled his Gladius and separated Archimedes’ head from his face. I suppose that if Archimedes had been sitting in his bathtub, as he allegedly was when he discovered that displaced water could be used to measure density (Eureka!), something else might have been separated. But, suffice it to say that before computers, finding pi was a great big pain in the Archimedes. He managed to figure out that pi was somewhere between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. He might have done better if he had invented the decimal point, first.

About the year 480 CE the Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi figured out that pi was a little more than 3.1415926 and a little less than 3.1415927. After that the decimal point zealots took over. The German mathematician and fencing instructor Ludolf van Ceulen worked out pi to 35 decimal places. And in 1873 the amateur geek, William Shanks, worked it out to 707 decimal places. But William made one tiny little mistake in the 528th number and that threw everything else off. But it was such a good try that nobody noticed his screw up until 1944. Today computers have figured pi out to one trillion digits to the left of the decimal point and still no repeatable pattern has been detected. It is still a little bit less than 3.15 and a little bit more than 3.14. All that has changed is the definition of “a little bit”. It keeps getting smaller and smaller but it will never be zero.

Still, pi remains the “admirable number” according to the devilish little Polish poetess Wislawa Szmborska. While being infinitly long it includes “…my phone number your shirt size, the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three sixth floor, number of inhabitants sixty-five cents, hip measurement two fingers a charade and a code, in which we find how blithe the trostle sings!” (…and no, I have no idea what or who the hell a trostle is. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t either. Do you?)

Daniel Rockmore, in the pages of "The Chronicle of High Education" for March 12, 1999, wrote that Pi was "Foreign, unpredictable, otherworldly, yet as common as a circle...it's easy to find, but hard to know. Why, among mathematicians there still rages a fierce, unsettled debate about whether pi is a "normal" number--that is, whether the digits 0 through 9 each occur on average one-tenth of the time in the never-ending decimal expansion of pi. The questions that surround pi's normalcy make it a veritable poster number for the fashion world's ambiguous and androgynous advertising campaigns."  And you thought mathamatics was not sexy.

A physician and crackpot amateur mathematician from Solitude, Indiana named Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin thought that he had “solved” pi to the last digit - and none of this irrational numerical horse feathers for him! He decided to make Pi his own personal private property by copyright it. But in order to profit from his discovery (you know how wealthy the Pythagoras estate is) Dr. Goodwin needed a legal endorsement. And rather than subject his brainchild to the vagaries of the copyright peer review, the good doctor instead offered his theory as an accomplished fact to the local politicians. The proposal, Indiana House Bill 246, “…an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered…to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost…provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature…”. This actually made it through the Committee on Canals and Swamps in record time, and was passed by the full house on February 5, 1897, by a vote of 67 to 0.  Who says politicians don't spend time on important issues?

Unfortunately, in the Indiana Senate some wiseacre showed the bill to a visiting Purdue party pooper, Professor of Mathematics C.A. Waldo. And now we at least know where Waldo was in 1897. The lawmaker asked if the professor would like the honor of meeting the amazing Dr. Goodwin, and Professor Waldo replied that he already knew all the lunatics he cared to know, thank you very much. And with that comment Dr. Goodwin’s brief bubble of fame was burst. On February 12, 1897 any further vote on the bill was postponed indefinitely.

It was not a victory for logic so much as an avoidance of a victory for ignorance, which is pretty much the same thing that happened in Tennessee about 30 years later when they tried a man for teaching evolution.

Still pi remains one of the most popular mathematical equations, if mostly poorly appreciated by those of us who aren’t trying to generate a random number or navigate a jet plane across the North Pole, or predict the next stock market bubble, or launch a satellite, run a radio station, process an X-ray or a Cat-scan, drive a submarine, drill for oil, purify gold or etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitas, infeliciter.

Just trust me, and always trust pi. It lifts your spirit, gives you a sense of security and keeps your circles on the square. To share it just try singing..."Pi, Pi, Me oh my, Nothing tastes sweet, wet, salty and dry, all at once, ...oh my, I love pi!

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BATTLE OF THE NATIVITY

I am tempted to call it a primeval struggle, drenched in antiquity, shrouded in religious fervor and destined to feed future conflict until come judgment day, whenever the heck that may  be. Except it just ain’t so. It is much simpler than that. The day after Christmas 2007, two rival gangs got into a dispute over turf and started to rumble. Somebody called the cops, who managed to separate the combatants, The Jets (AKA the Greek Orthodox Priests), and the Sharks (AKA the Armenian Apostolic Priests) were battling inside the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birth place of the Prince of Peace in Bethlehem, Israel, Palestinian Territories. And nothing about this melee made any more sense than a street brawl. And yet I blame the French Emperor Napoleon III for the entire mess.

First, a word about all that antiquity – it does not appear to have happened where everybody now thinks it did. Roman census or no census, there was no reason for a pregnant Mary to be making a 90 mile donkey ride from Nazareth, on the Galilee plain of northern Israel, to Bethlehem in the mountains just south of Jerusalem, in the west center of Israel. Being the man, Joseph was expected and qualified to speak for his entire family. He would have been the only one required to travel. But why require anybody to travel? The Romans census did what we still do today - they counted people where they were. That would was where their property was, and where their money was. Why disrupt business all across a rebellious province, in the name of counting people where they were not? It makes no sense.

And there is another problem, an archeological problem. There is no archeology in Bethlehem from that period. The ground under today's Bethlehem contains Iron Age artifacts and Byzantine artifacts, but nothing in between, nothing from the age of Jesus. The village outside of Jerusalem did not exist on the night that Jesus was born.. However, there was another Bethlehem, “Bethlehem HaGalilit”, Bethlehem of Galilee, just about 7 miles to the west of Nazareth. It seems far more likely that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem HaGalilit, than in Bethlehem, Judea. But because that Bethlehem HaGalilit no longer existed in the fourth century of the common era, when the Byzantine Christians came looking for Jesus' birthplace, they jumped to the wrong conclusion and picked the wrong Bethlehem. So did the followers of Islam, when they first captured the region in year 627 B.C.E.

Well, after the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land in 1187 the Muslim rulers did not trust the Roman Catholics, who had invaded them and now made up a majority of Bethlehem’s population. So they split contnrol of the profitable tourist sites in Bethlehm between the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches, in particular the church built upon the “traditional” site of the birth or Jesus. The Greek Orthodox were given control of one part of the building, the Armenian Orthodox control of another part. This allowed the Ottomans to play the two Christian sects against one another, and to play them both off the Roman Catholics, who were now the poor relations in town.

And here some calm was achieved in a region not famous for calm, until 1852, when a “firman” (or edict) was issued by Abdulmecit I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of the Muslim World. Abdulmecit issued this edict because…well, because first, in 1847 some thug stole the silver star which marked the “traditional” spot of Jesus’ birth, in the floor of the Church of the Nativity, and, more importantly, because the Sultan was weak and because Louis Napoleon III of France was a pompous political hack, who believed that he had been chosen by God to fix, first France, and then rest of the world.

Louis Napoleon was elected to a ten year term as the first President of the Second Republic of France in December of 1848. He immediately started plotting to follow in his uncle’s imperial boot prints. By early in 1852 Louis had helped to restore the Vatican’s independence in Rome (which pleased French Catholic voters), but he had also insisted that the new Papal government be drawn up along “liberal” lines, to placate the liberal (meaning non-Catholic) French voters. But the Catholic Church never likes to be lectured about liberal policies from secular politicians. Just try it some time and see.

In an attempt to placate the now angry Catholic voters Louis suggested that the theft of the star from the Church of the Nativity (five years earlier) proved that the Church of the Nativity was no longer “safe”, and control should be handed over to the Roman Catholic Church for protection. This pleased Pope Pius IX., who had come to the conclusion that Czar Nicholas I was intent upon wiping out Catholicism in Russia. (Which he was.)

Louis' demand also pleased Abdulmecit I, because Albdulmecit had the distinct feeling that Nicholas was about to invade Turkey. (Which he was.) So under Abdulmecit's edict, the keys to the Church of the Nativity were now handed over the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. But the edict also required the Vatican to maintain the church “in statu quo res errant”, or, “as it was before”. This edict was the popularization of the phrase in English “status quo”.

Now, all of his life Russian Czar Nicholas I had been told that Russia was a military superpower and protector of the true faith, that faith being Christian Greek Orthodoxy. And Nicholas was not about to allow a mere “politician”, least of all a trumped up “Bonaparte”, to usurp his regal and holy authority. Nicholas demanded the keys to the Church of the Nativity be returned to the Armenian and Greek priests. And when they were not, he declared war on Turkey. (Of course, he had been planning on doing that anyway.)  Britain and France came to Turkey’s defense. And so Louis’ gambit to impress French voters led directly to the Crimean War, and 118,000 dead; of whom 20, 000 were French, and 73,000 were Russian.

In his rise to power Louis had shamelessly played one political faction off another, eventually abolished democracy in his own state, created a throne for himself, invaded Algeria and Vietnam (both of which came back to haunt France a century later) and was finally goaded into the 1870 Franco-Prussian War which resulted in his humiliating defeat, the creation of Germany, Louis’ own overthrow and death. This guy was the George Bush of 19th century France.

The Crimean War also cost Nicholas I his life. While on campaign he caught a chill and died of pneumonia on March 2,1855. The Sultan, Abdülmecit, lived long enough to see his nation plunged into debt by that same war. And by his death from tuberculosis in 1861, Turkey was flat broke. His succesor was dethroned.

And Pope Pius IX, was just angry. Despite the support of France, because France was distracted by the Crimean War, the Catholic Church lost control of Italy in 1860 to Victor Emmanuel, who established the modern nation of Italy. But Pius achieved his revenge in the religious sector, which he still controled. In 1869 he issued the decree of Papal infallibility and the dogma of Immaculate Conception. Together these meant that Mary, mother of Jesus, was without sin because the Pope said she was without sin. And the Pope was never wrong, because he said he was never wrong. That was not church dogma until 1869.

But, let us finally return to the Church of the Nativity on December 27, 2007. According to the Associated Press; “Yesterday, dozens of priests and cleaners came to the fortress-like church to scrub and sweep the floors, walls and rafters ahead of the Armenian and Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in the first week of January. Thousands of tourists visited the church this week for (Catholic) Christmas celebrations. But the clean-up turned ugly after some of the Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church's section, touching off a scuffle between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians. Palestinian police, armed with batons and shields, quickly formed a human cordon to separate the two sides so the cleaning could continue...Four people, some with blood running from their faces, were slightly injured.”

Traditionally both the Orthodox and Armenian churches have recruited their priests for this sacred post from tiny isolated villages scattered across Greece and the Balkans, where Christians (and Muslims) have been slaughtering each other for a thousand years. These naive young men now suddenly found themselves working in intimate contact and sharing the most precious artifacts of their faith with heretics. Nothing in their lives or their training prepared them for that kind of peacful coexsistence.

And the whole thing was Louis Napoleon’s fault. But try explaining that to a bunch of foreigners.

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THE BELLE OF BEDLAM

I wonder what was going through the mind of lawyer M.E. Leliter, on the afternoon of April 27, 1908, when he was told Mrs. Belle Gunness was waiting in the anteroom of his Main Street office. I doubt he was pleased to see her. But you never think the worse, do you? When someone who makes you feel uneasy appears at your door you never think of evil. You always think of normal everyday humanity. Belle was a genial and pleasant church going woman. And if M.E. had always felt uneasy around her, he must have ascribed his nervousness to all the tragedy in her life. M.E. always thought he could detect the aura of hidden pain behind her sharp Nodic blue eyes.

In Chicago, Illinois, Belle had buried two of her children, not an unusual tragedy in the nintinth century. But then in 1900 her husband, Anton Sorenson, had died of heart disease. With the procedes from Anton’s two life insurance policies, Belle, with her three surviving children, had purchesed a farm on the northeast outskirts of La Portte Indiana, out on McClung Road past Pine and Fish Trap lakes. It was there she had married widower Peter Gunness on April 1st, of 1902. And, tragically, that very summer, Peter’s young daughter had died after a short illness, and then in December, Peter himself had been struck on the head by a falling saugase grinder and killed. Her life been so tragic that M.E. forced a smile as he stepped out to greet the lumbering, six foot tall, 280 pound woman. (Community gossips said that Belle could carry 100 pound hogs, one under each arm.) But Belle was not interested in pleasantries. Someone, Belle announced, was trying to kill her.

Her tale had a ting of unrealty to M.E. He was one of the most promiment of the 14,000 citizens of La Porte, just across the Indiana line. Fifteen passanger trains a day passed through town on their way between Philadelphia and Chicago, 60 miles to the northwest. Perched atop the prairie, the town was surrouned by farms, including one owned by M.E.. But it was also home to the Meinaid Rumely Factory, whose 2,000 employees assembled steam powered threashers and were rushing to manufacture one of the world’s first internal combustion farm tractors, the “Kerosene Annie”.

As befitted a prosperous middle class community, just down the street from M.E.’s office stood the new red sandstone Romanesque Court House, with oak paneled court rooms and stained glass windows. The disturbed Belle and her accusations seemed more fitting in the lurid crime ridden alleys of Chicago than small, quiet, proper, Victorian, La Porte.

The potential assassian was Ray Lamphere, who until recently had been Belle’s hired hand. Six weeks ago she had fired Ray, and he had threatened her and her two youngest daughters. “I'm afraid he's going to kill me and burn the house,” Belle told M.E. Thank goodness Belle’s eldest daughter, Jennie, was safely away at a finishing school in Los Angeles. Yes, Belle had spoken with the police. Twice she had charged Ray with trespassing. But they refused to grant her a protection order, and had dismissed her allegation that Ray was insane. Now, out of an excesss of caution, Belle wanted to amend her will. She wanted to be certain that her estate would to go to her children. And, if for some reason, they were deceased, then Belle wanted all her property to go to a Norwegian orphanage back in Chicago. M.E. took down the information, and made an oppointment for Belle to return in a few days to sign the completed document.

Then shocking news came with the morning light. There had been a terrible fire at the Gunness farm in the early morning hours of April 28, 1908. Despite the noble efforts of Belle’s new hired hand, and two passing men, no one had made it out of the house alive. Eventually the beams and the furniture had crashed into the basement. By noon the heat had retreated enough for workers to shift the ashes. There they found the pitiful bodies of Belle’s three children, Myrtle and Lucy Sorensen, and Philip Gunness, aged 5, as well as the blackened, headless corpse of a woman presumed to be Belle. And when the cops arrested Ray Lamphere he blurted out, “Did Widow Gunness and the kids get out all right?” It seemed an open and shut case. Except…

First there was the woman’s body; when doctors examined the corpse they described the woman as weighing no more than 150 pounds. Neighbors who had sewn clothing for Belle were adament that the corpse could not be her’s. So back to the ashes went the searchers. And what they found raised even more questions; they found men’s pocket watches, rings and wallets. And then a man arrived in town looking for his middle aged brother, who was last seen in La Porte, having responded to a notice in a South Dakota lonely hearts column. Finally asked, her mailman informed the sheriff that Belle had mailed and received 8 to 10 letters a day. The searchers spread out across the farm.

They found and disinterred the body of daughter Jennie, who was supposed to have been away at school. The found beneath the pig pen the bodies of ten to fourteen men and women, many of whom had been last seen visiting Belle’s farm. Cyanide was found in some of the victims’ bodies. But how many more victims had been fed to Belle’s hogs, or buried in undiscovered graves on the farm? When finally added up the list of known and suspected victims reached forty. Belle Gunness could well have been the most prolific serial killer in American history, certainly the most hard working serial murderess.

The jury at Ray Lamphere’s trail found him not guilty of murder, but guilty of arson. They also issued a statement asserting that Belle’s body had been found in the ashes. But Ray insisted to the day he died that Belle had escaped. And for the next decade sightings of Belle were reported from about Midwest. And most intriguing, there was Esther Carlson, arrested in Los Angeles in 1931, for the murder of a Norwegian immigrant. The motive was alledged to be theft of his money. It was alleged that her weapon of choice had been poison. But nothing was ever proved. Esther died while awaiting trial. But two expatriates from La Porte identified photos of Esther Carlson as Belle Gunness. And if that seems pretty far fetched, a tale for those obsessed with conspiracy theories, remember that it is the nature of most people, especially those in a small town, that when they hear of a tragedy their first thought is never of a conspiracy of evil - even if sometimes that is exactly what it is.

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ELEPHANT DIAPHRAGMS

I want to begin by stating the facts. When Joe Frisbie died in 1940, his widow, Marina, inherited the family bakery. She ran the ovens on Kossuth Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut for the next 18 years, baking up to 80,000 pies a day. As was the industry standard at the time, each of the tin pie plates was stamped with the company name, and carried a 5 cent deposit, to be repaid for every pie tin returned to the bakery. In 1958 Marina sold the family business to Table Talk Pies, out of Worcester, Massachusetts, and Frisbie Pies ceased to exist. Table Talk is still in business, and bakes 220,000 pies a day. Those are the facts. Now, somehow the legend has been perpetrated that students at Yale University began throwing the pie tins, and thus invented the Frisbee.

The first problem with this legend is that Yale University is not in Bridgeport. Yale is in New Haven, which is 20 miles further to the north. And that is a very long way to throw a Frisbee. There are other problems with the legend, all of which give me the feeling that the Yale alumni were throwing something around besides pie plates. But despite these facts, an original Frisbie Pie tin still sells on Ebay for about $25 – a 25,000% increase in value, primarily because of its mythical connection to a plastic toy. The non-immaculate conception of the Frisbee is a much more interesting story than the myth.

According to the tale as related by Fred Morrison to writer Ben Van Heuvelen a few years before Fred’ death, back in 1937 the then 17 year old Fred and his fiancé Lucile Nay were in her back yard tossing around the lid from a can of popcorn, because they didn’t have a football. The lid’s flight was horribly erratic, and the teenagers made a game of trying to predict which direction the lid would take on each toss. Over the California winter, the pair began playing the game with various lids and plates, looking for a better “spin”. One spring afternoon, while they were tossing a five cent pie plate around on the beach, a man approached Fred and asked where he could buy the toy. Fred immediately sold him the lid for a quarter – a 500% profit.

Having been slapped in the face by opportunity, the couple bought pie tins in bulk from a local hardware store and every weekend took them to the beach where they tossed the tins back and forth, to attract a crowd. The resultant sales did not make anybody rich, but this was still the depression, and every quarter helped. Then World War Two changed the world. 1946 found the couple living in an Army surplus tent in San Luis Obispo. Fred was pouring concrete slabs for home fuel tanks, and Lucy was working at a Lockheed plant. But Fred couldn’t get the profitable spinning pie plate idea out of his head, and eventually mentioned it to his boss, Warren Franscioni. Warren had been a pilot in the war, like Fred, and he also saw the potential in the product, like Fred. But, it seems that unlike Fred, Warren had been paying attention in ground school, and was familiar with the work of Daniel Bernoulli.

Daniel is one of those little known people who should be more famous, for a number of reasons. I remember Daniel because his father, Johann Bernouli, was the biggest heel in the history of mathematics. Despite Daniel’s love of numbers Johann forced the boy into medical school. But Daniel refused to give up on numbers. At one point, father and son tied for a first prize in physics. Johann was so consumed by jealousy that he kicked Daniel out of the house. Johann then waited until Daniel published the work he had won the prize for, and then Johann rewrote the same material, backdating it, so it looked like the son had stolen from the father. What a heel. Father and son never spoke again.

Of course what most people remember about Daniel Bernouli is that before he was 30 he had laid out the mathematics of flight, two hundred years before they would be put to use; one half the pressure of a fluid, times the velocity of the fluid squared, plus the density of the fluid, equals the Bernouli constant. And that may mean nothing to you, (it confuses the heck out of me) but it keeps airplanes in the air, and, with the spin imparted by a flick of the wrist, keeps a Frisbee floating on the air.

Warren explained the Bernouli laws to Fred, and Fred diagramed the basic pie plate shape, except he added a thick outer edge to mimic an airplane’s wing. He called the angle toward the center of the plate “The Morrison Slope”. The pair then drove down to Glendale, California, and showed their drawings to the Southern California Plastic Company. The manager saw the potential and invested eight cylinders of a new plastic, Tennite, which he handed over to the pair from San Louis for testing. Fred then drew eight variations on his original drawing. But before they handed the plastic over to a machinist to carve the drawings into reality, he changed the title on the plans, to disguise the product. He labeled the schematics “Diaphragms for Elephants”. I guess he figured that title would not arouse any curiosity.

Fred and Warren tested the diaphragms, and delivered the one that flew the best to Glendale. In 1948 the first production run of 3,000 Whirlo-Ways (patent #183626) were squeezed out of the injection molds in just two colors, black and blue. Lucile wrote the copy for the packaging, instructing customers to “Play catch – invent games. Experiment!” In 1951 Warren reenlisted in the Air Force for the Korean War, and Fred and Lucy continued to develop the Whirlo-Ways by themselves.

Marketing now took over. The Whirlo-Ways became Whirloways, Flyin-Saucers, Flying Saucers, and Pluto Platters. But the basics of the device did not change; it was a thing that, when you threw it, it floated and bobbed and weaved with a grace that a ball can only dream of.

In 1955, while Fred and Lucile were displaying their Pluto Platters in Los Angeles, they were spotted by two falcon hunters, who had formed a company to market their plastic sling shot, intended to propel meat into the air for training birds of prey. They named their company “Wham-O” after the shout they made when firing their sling shots. But Arthur "Spud" Melin and Richard Knerr were smart enough to realize that most of their slingshots were not being bought by falconers. The problem was they weren’t sure who was buying them.

So they decided to change products, and jumped at the chance to use their meager sling shot profits to buy the North American rights to a Australian bamboo exercise tool which, duplicated in plastic, became the Hula Hoop. Wham-O sold 25 million Hula Hoops in four months, 100 million in two years. In 1956 the pair used their profits from the Hula Hoops to pay Fred and Lucille one million dollars for the patent and the molds of Pluto Platters.

Wham-O’s designers made some improvements on the platters, and in 1958, the year after Frisbie Pies had shut down, they renamed the Pluto Platter as the Frisbee. Why they chose that name I have never been able to discover to my satisfaction. But I suspect somebody in the Wham-O marketing department was a Yale Alumni. The rest is history.

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